Fear TWD Writers Reveal What Happened to Missing Characters

[Spoiler alert for the Fear the Walking Dead series finale.] When Fear the Walking Dead ended its eight-season run on Sunday, the two-episode series finale at long last revealed what happened to Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey) — and even Skidmark the cat. But viewers were left without answers about what became of other unaccounted for characters: rabbi Jacob (Peter Jacobson) and Rabinowitz siblings Sarah (Mo Collins) and Wendell (Daryl Mitchell). The last we saw the missing survivors, they were escaping radioactive Texas by raft in the penultimate episode of season 7, and then... nothing. 

After a seven-year time skip started season 8, Sarah, Wendell, and Jacob were feared dead when Victor Strand (Colman Domingo) told Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) in the "Anton" midseason premiere that the group who washed up on the shores of Georgia were separated. Some, like Morgan Jones (Lennie James), ended up at PADRE, while others were "struggling to survive" in the wilderness, Strand said. He then suggested that those who didn't make it to PADRE died from starvation.

According to showrunners and series finale writers Ian Goldberg and Andrew Chambliss, Sarah, Wendell, and Jacob are alive — just off-screen — and trucking out east as part of Luciana's (Danay García) Gearheads group that operates a road network stretching across the country.

"One story thread that we had initially planned to address was seeing what happened to Sarah, Wendell, and Rabbi Jacob. And when we got into the planning of the final six episodes, we just didn't have the room for it," Chambliss told EW. "And looking back, it's a bummer to us that we didn't get to say goodbye to those characters, but it was always in our imagination that they are part of Luciana's crew out there keeping the roads clear between Texas and the East Coast." 

In a postmortem Q&A with ComicBook, the showrunners revealed that their script for the 51-minute Fear the Walking Dead series finale initially boarded out to 22 days. But the filmmakers had to fit that into just 12 days.

"We had a lot of cuts to make," Goldberg explained. "But if you saw that version of the script versus what showed up on screen, it is fundamentally the same story. We just had to make some concessions for production reasons, but the integrity of the story that we wanted to tell, it's all there. And that did not change."

Read our full Fear finale postmortem with Goldberg and Chambliss, and our series finale Q&A with Kim Dickens.

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